Lee_Wheeler wrote:So all information on the length of the test was wrong. Ours clocked in at 28 seconds for the message and was not bilingual as had been advertised.

No drama whatsoever and it was nice that we knew it was coming so that we could shift the :20 break and not blow up a spot set.

Now the next phase of fun begins - Form Two.

...Lee

Form 2 is easy. Once you figure out you get to it via Form 1.

Did you get it? Did you send it?

3 out of 4 of my clients did ok. The 4th "assured me" his EAS was all up and ready to go. So now it's time to go and find out what mess their EAS has become... (I have been pretty much hands off, as the director up there is quite tech savvy and I had it all setup for him a long time back)

My fear was the Commission servers not being up to the task. I logged in right at 4:00 PM Central and there were no delays at all except for failing to check the certification box on my part on the first station. I think staggering the reporting by time zone likely helped with any server overload issues.

I was only reporting for four stations and I chose to do them individually rather than batch mode since it would give us instant gratification that the form had been filed. The instructions for batch filing indicated that it might take a while for the spreadsheet to be processed and respond with an affirmative filing response.

I was surprised how easy this actually was. The test wasn't much more than what you expect from a common RMT. I don't think I spent more than 5 or maybe 6 minutes on form 3, looking up receipt and transmit times. Within an hour or so, I had everything done.

Sure not the 20-some hours the system said to expect to spend on "each station", huh?

PID_Stop wrote:
Interestingly, several of our stations picked up and relayed the test from LP1s, and got the CAP version a few seconds later... not an effect I was expecting, but a darn sight better than 2011's test.

-- Jeff

That was also noted, here in the Seattle area. The explanation (from Sage) is the time lag between polling. If you got your alert from an LP, they probably polled IPAWS before your system did. Sage says "nothing sinister". While you might have preferred a nice, clean playout from the internet, the system did what it was designed to do.

Ran fine on all three of our subs. Sounded great. Huge improvement on last time, although it would have been pretty difficult to *not* improve on last time.

Form 2 is complete. Not much to it. The page said please don't submit Form 3 until tomorrow so I didn't:)

I did do some looking around right after the test (for one thing, my boss hadn't heard about the Commission not wanting Form 2 filed until 4:00 so I wanted to send him the link) & the site was pretty snappy. Maybe some of you who had many stations to file for feel differently but I'm not thinking the staggered filing was necessary.

(I suppose it's also possible we'll find out the load was less than expected because a bunch of stations didn't bother to file:) )

I've heard tales of no EOM bursts in some places, or of muddy audio at the end. That wasn't my experience here in Nashville.

No problem up here in central WI either. Picked it up off the CAP server and relayed it immediately. Audio was clean if a little low. Our monitored stations aired the test after we'd already received it from CAP, Sage and Gorman boxes here just ignored them.

Happy we aired it directly off of CAP, the Sage boxes start recording audio at the start of the received attention signal, which it then plays back after adding it's own. Last test I think we had two sets of attention signals on the incoming audio, to which we added a third.
The Gormans, despite their funkiness, don't do that, not recording until the end of ATTN.

The Sages are supposed to edit out the ATTN tones but they are fussy about the incoming levels.

RMTs here we usually do not get the ATTN tones filtered out. Not today for this NPT. It was perfect. I wish our RMTs were this snappy. The originating station leaves a 10 second pause between the ATTN and the message. I can only guess they are stretching it to be almost 60 seconds for the whole thing because they can't get it within 30.

What we relayed today was received from the State Relay radio station. We got a split second of classical music after the EOMs on the AMs which go through the Sage MSRP. The FM which does not didn't get the split second of undesired audio. This is something that has cropped up some time after we installed the MSRP. I wonder if there is an adjustment in it for the time-out after the EOMs. Can't look it up right now.

I just happened to be watching a channel on DirecTV at 2:23pm EDT when, for the first time in 8 years, I saw an actual EBS test screen take over the signal, complete with three locally-generated alert tones. That part was fine. They they fed some very poor, highly compressed, over-the-air audio signal to us. It sounded like the receiver was somewhere between Mexico and Texas, picking up several stations at the same time and not all in English. Very much over-driven, with weak music playing the entire time. I then heard the voice announcement start, with more faint test tones coming through underneath it. The voice and test tones echoed about 6 seconds later, as if there was some regenerative tape delay, but the echoing kept getting weaker. This kept going on until three more test tones ended the test. There was also a crawl on the bottom of the screen. Eventually the test screen faded out (pixellated) and control went back to the previously playing show on that channel. There was no clean entry or return, at least not clean like a video switcher had been used. It was more like someone had aimed a second transmitting dish at the satellite and just overpowered the channel, then switched off at the end.

Not sure where ATT/DirecTV got their audio feed from, but while present it was almost useless and unintelligible. If I didn't know what it was supposed to sound like, I'd never have understood it.

Sorry for my use of "EBS". Change that to "EAS", "EAN", or whatever three-letter acronym is being used these days. I'm an old-timer and back in the 60s and 70s, when the "fake" EBS test came through one fine Saturday morning at 9:33EST, I was on duty that morning and decided to keep our stations on the air, so for me, it's always gonna be EBS - Emergency Botched System.